where's the love?

This is my first attempt at posting on my new(ish) blog for my academic self. I have a fannish self, too; dealing with the contradictions of being an medievalist and a fan and an aca-fan are one of the things I'll be thinking about a lot over the next few years, and it's appropriate that I should start by posting about my first ever attendance of the International Congress of Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, Michigan.

I attended a number of interesting papers at Kalamazoo, but I quickly realized that the point of Kzoo is to meet people, to have conversations; I saw that the old hands were spending just as much time reconnecting with old department friends as they were going to papers. It made sense, then, that I got far more out of the three round table discussions I attended. The first was entitled 'How to get the Medieval Studies you want' (there is a nice write-up of it here). I went to this expecting to be completely depressed by people talking about the impossibility of getting grants, the growing belief in the irrelevance of Medieval Studies, and general predictions of the apocalypse, but instead I was blown away by the energy and optimism in the room. People were talking about relevance, about interdisciplinarity, about positive ways to persuade your university administration of the importance of your subject. It was exciting and inspiring. Eileen Joy of BABEL also talked about pleasure, about taking pleasure in our work, which is something I feel very strongly about, but I'll get to that.

The second round table discussion, 'Are we enjoying ourselves?' was about pleasure. I was really disappointed and bewildered by this panel, and it took a couple of hours hashing it out with my friend C to work out why. The high point was Carolyn Dinshaw's excellent and fun exploration of amateurism vs. professionalism in medieval studies, and that was what I wanted to hear about: does it make a difference, to oneself and to others, to take pleasure in one's work? Does it affect the quality of your scholarship? The academy has traditionally looked down on the amateur who does it for love - can one be a professional who does it for love? Is there, in fact, a professional who does not do it for love? What other reasons can one do medieval studies for? Can't we do what we do out of, say, wish to be bored, or anger, or duty, or a wish for power, influence or money? Do we have to disclaim these things, if we have to disclaim pleasure? If not, why not? To what extent is pleasure different from other motivations, and is it more or less valid? Do we, or should we, pretend to or not to feel pleasure in what we do? But the panel seemed to stop at, 'We feel pleasure in our work.'

All the way through this, I couldn't stop thinking about a panel I attended earlier this year at the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts, on the history of sci-fi criticism. It turned into a fascinating and nuanced discussion on the growing professionalisation of what had originally been purely amateur scholarship, by fans for fans, and on the way this had changed both the scholarship itself and the way it was perceived by fans and the academy. The criticism itself had become, in general, better informed and more accessible to academics outside the field and to posterity, citing its sources and drawing on contemporary literary theory. But at the same time, this use of theoretical language and increasing specialization as the field expands and evolves has made it less accessible to fans, while sci-fi scholarship is still marginalized within the academy as being less professional, too involved - it's a lifestyle, rather than a field of study. They're too fannish.

All the way through Kalamazoo, I was interested in the differences between it and the ICFA: both are huge conferences, both have an acknowledged fannish contingent (ICFA has late-night RPG sessions and author readings, Kzoo has mead-tasting, panels on WoW and Harry Potter, and Society of Creative Anachronism meetings), both have a remarkable mix of first-timers giving papers of varying quality, and big name old-timers. Kzoo was slightly less informal in dress code (although that may be the difference between a campus in Michigan and a hotel in Florida), and was a more solidly 'academic' conference, and I supposed that was the difference between Medieval Studies and Sci-Fi/Fantasy Studies, or, in my case, Fan Studies. But then I went to the last of my three round table panels, a Tolkien round table on Tom Shippey's contribution to the field. By that time, I was having a serious case of conference burnout, and I flopped down into my seat, intending not to stay, but then I instantly felt at home, and sat there for two hours. I'm not a Lord of the Rings scholar, but I'm a fan, and I felt like I was back among my people, and I didn't have to pretend to be something I wasn't anymore. But I'm not sure what it was that I'd been pretending to be. Grown-up? professional? objective? pretentious? And why did I feel that the Tolkienists weren't one or more of those things?

I'm not quite sure what the difference was between the atmosphere in that room and the atmosphere in the - far more crowded and excited - room where we were all talking about pleasure, but then I wondered why nobody who worked in Tolkien Studies had been in the panel full of serious medievalists doing fancy, fashionable theory and talking about what big fans they were, without using the word, or really talking about what it might mean to use it. Tolkienists are a prominent community at Kzoo every year who face, in their institutions and by the wider academy, being labeled as amateur purely because of what they study, because, among other reasons, their pleasure in it is assumed.

I think that, if we are to talk about how we may use and experience pleasure as academics in medieval studies, we have to talk to the fans of sci-fi and fantasy. There is such a huge overlap between our populations; many of us lead double lives and fear any blurring between our professional and fannish identities. I wish that I'd made it to the panel on blogging and online personas (happening, ironically, at the same time as this Tolkien round table), as I'm willing to bet that a lot of the people in that room were fans as well as academics, and I would have been interested to hear whether people were talking about that.

Fans, and scholars of traditionally fannish texts, are in the process of developing a theory and praxis of dealing with their own emotional involvement with the texts they study. This is not a new thing. If we, as medievalists, want to create a scholarly community that is more like fandom, the kind of community that BABEL proposes - (nominally) egalitarian, internet-based, communal, avowedly pleasurable and pleasured - then why does nobody seem to be talking to the people who are trying to create professionally respected scholarship from within that kind of community, who are struggling with being too relevant to modern society and culture? Fan Studies and Medieval Studies are natural allies. Fans permeate medieval studies, and medievalness seems to be a quality that permeates the most popular of fan texts - Lord of the Rings, WoW, Harry Potter, Buffy, even Dan Brown. I'm told that every year my department gets at least one proposal from a person who self-identifies as an elf.

I met literary criticism and fan criticism at about the same time, and my approach to texts has been shaped equally by both. I read medieval Latin literature as a fan, and I read pop media texts as a medievalist. I want to write my thesis on affective engagement with texts in medieval literature, on medieval fans. What I want to know, I suppose, is where are the fans in medieval studies? What is the difference between being a fan and a medievalist? Is it just the difference between wearing a suit and wearing a bow and quiver?